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Now peculiar scraps of knowledge were stuck to him like lint from all his jobs.

Anne Tyler

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Anne Tyler
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: October 25
Librarian
Novelist
Short Story Writer
Writer
Minneapolis
Minnesota
Peculiar
Stuck
Information
Knowledge
Jobs
Like
Lint
Scraps
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More quotes by Anne Tyler

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I do write long, long character notes - family background, history, details of appearance - much more than will ever appear in the novel. I think this is what lifts a book from that early calculated, artificial stage.
Anne Tyler
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I remember leaving the hospital - thinking, 'Wait, are they going to let me just walk off with him? I don't know beans about babies! I don't have a license to do this.' We're just amateurs.
Anne Tyler
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Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person.
Anne Tyler
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For me, writing something down was the only road out...I hated childhood, and spent it sitting behind a book waiting for adulthood to arrive. When I ran out of books I made up my own. At night, when I couldn't sleep, I made up stories in the dark.
Anne Tyler
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I would advise any beginning writer to write the first drafts as if no one else will ever read them - without a thought about publication - and only in the last draft to consider how the work will look from the outside.
Anne Tyler
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The very thing that attracts you to someone can end up putting you off.
Anne Tyler
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I spend about a year between novels
Anne Tyler
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I never think about the actual process of writing. I suppose I have a superstition about examining it too closely.
Anne Tyler
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I think it must be very hard to be one of the new young writers who are urged to put themselves forward when it may be the last thing on earth they'd be good at
Anne Tyler
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I'll write maybe one long paragraph describing the events, then a page or two breaking the events into chapters, and then reams of pages delving into my characters. After that, I'm ready to begin
Anne Tyler
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It seems to me that since I've had children, I've grown richer and deeper. They may have slowed down my writing for a while, but when I did write, I had more of a self to speak from.
Anne Tyler
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But what I hope for from a book - either one that I write or one that I read - is transparency. I want the story to shine through. I don't want to think of the writer.
Anne Tyler
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Ever consider what pets must think of us? I mean, here we come back from a grocery store with the most amazing haul - chicken, pork, half a cow. They must think we're the greatest hunters on earth!
Anne Tyler
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Not until the final draft do I force myself to remember that I'm going to have to think about how it will affect other people.
Anne Tyler
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People always call it luck when you've acted more sensibly than they have.
Anne Tyler
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I read so I can live more than one life in more than one place.
Anne Tyler
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It struck her all at once that dealing with other human beings was an awful lot of work.
Anne Tyler
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The Amateur Marriage grew out of the reflection that of all the opportunities to show differences in character, surely an unhappy marriage must be the richest.
Anne Tyler
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Odd how clear it suddenly became, once a person had died, that the body was the very least of him.
Anne Tyler
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Time, in general, has always been a central obsession of mine - what it does to people, how it can constitute a plot all on its own. So naturally, I am interested in old age.
Anne Tyler